Agroecology Radio Hour

Episode 5 - Jacob Birch

• Tammi Jonas

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This month we chat with Jacob Birch, he is a Gamilaraay man, a member of AFSA's first peoples sub committee, academic and Churchill Fellow who is doing incredible work in reawakening native grain food ways.

Unfortunately we had some technical issues with the audio and lost the last section of the interview but we still managed to capture the majority of the conversation.

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Links:

Become a member of AFSA: https://afsa.org.au/join-us/

Yaamarra and Yarral: https://www.yaamarraandyarral.com.au/about/our-people

Jacob Birch Churchill Fellow: https://www.churchilltrust.com.au/fellow/jacob-birch-qld-2022/

Jacob:

The community's still involved there, you know, doing the wild harvest and stuff like that, but all of the value add is being done in capital cities like Perth, Melbourne. whatever. yeah. You know, like these communities are spending weeks or months at a time out. Their whole family's out there harvesting, carting, you know, 20 kilo bags across countryside, back to the depot, um, and getting sort of peanuts for it, and then mm-hmm. Someone with a fancy label in the city. Powders it and sells it for a fortune.

Lucy:

Welcome to another episode of the Agroecology Radio Hour, your monthly podcast that explores the issues of food sovereignty in the Australian landscape. I'm your host, Lucy Ridge, speaking to you from the unseated lands of the Nawal and Nambay peoples. In this episode, we are speaking with another member of SSA's, first People's subcommittee, Jacob Birch. We had a really great chat with Jacob, but unfortunately we had just a few technical difficulties which cut our conversation short, but there's plenty of great stuff that we did manage to record, so we thought we'd release it anyway and we hope you enjoy it. Jacob Birch is a Roy Man academic and Churchill Fellow who is doing incredible work in reawakening native grain food ways. Welcome Jacob.

Jacob:

Hey, Yama. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Lucy:

Oh, thanks for joining us today. Um, and to start with, I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit about where you are right now and, and what's happening, uh, on that country at the moment.

Jacob:

um, yeah. I'm on Cubby country, so, uh, sunshine Coast, Queensland, um, sort of that southern end of the Sunshine Coast around Calandra. Uh, it's looking like it's gonna rain. It's very overcast. It's actually, we had a cyclone hit you may have heard about a couple weeks ago. Um, it's actually windier today than when the cyclone was around. Oh really? But it's nice'cause it's cooling the weather that, that change in weather's coming through.

Lucy:

Yeah, definitely. Um,

Jacob:

which is interesting to changes that it brings here in a subtropical environment.

Lucy:

Yeah. Um, so to start off, I wanted to ask about the beginning of your journey and how you developed your interest in native grains and indigenous food ways. What led you down this path? And, and can you talk a bit about the green economies, especially of the Gila Roy people?

Jacob:

I guess like, you know, how far do you wanna go back with this stuff too? Like, I feel like all people come from like a. You know, connection to the land, you know, working the land, whether it was like our parents or our great grandparents, or our distant ancestors. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, we've all sort of had our hands in the soil. Um, you know, being deeply sort of connected into the landscape and it doesn't matter where you come from, whether you're, um, indigenous or Anglo or from any other part of the world that we've all sort of been involved in that practice. So Inga just something that's inherently within in all people. Yeah. Like having, having parents interested in, in. You know, not farming. We, we didn't have land, we weren't farmers. My, you know, my family were working in agriculture. But yeah, just, just that passion for gardening and being outside and that kind of stuff. And then, I think the real shift sort of came when I traveled overseas. Um, I actually sort of wrote about this little journey in an essay that will be coming out in a book, you know, it's an essay and part of a bigger book. Um, yeah. Went through sort of Europe, got really interested in permaculture over there. Mm-hmm. So I hadn't really heard that word in Australia before. Um, you know, went to London to do that typical kind of London thing and we lasted two weeks. Um, got sick of it.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Uh, it's super expensive and. A bit bit boring. Um, and, but in that being there came across permaculture, I think it was like in a laundromat one day and there was a flyer for a permaculture festival or something. And yeah, I ended up volunteering for a week at this permaculture festival. Um, yeah, it was really cool. And just, I guess just got really interested then in, you know, growing food.'cause like we, you know, come from a family that garden and grew food and now I was getting into like all these different types of medicinal herbs and stuff before we left. And so that was just a natural progression and yeah, started traveling all around Europe. Like, um, I. Help ex, which is kind of like wolfing, but less exploitative.

Lucy:

Excellent.

Jacob:

You know, it's a real, real immersion into, into, um, generally into a family. Like you brought in, you do a bit of work around the yard and it's a real cultural immersion. And um, you know, did that in Norway, Sardinia and Sardinia Really? Was that light bulb kind of thing?'cause that's like an ancient food system still in practice.

Mm.

Jacob:

Uh, ancient culture still still retaining parts of their culture. Like, you know, pre Roman culture.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Um, and just the diversity of food, the localized food systems. Um, yeah, it, it was just incredible to sort of be a part of, you know, we were harvesting ofs. Hand harvesting olives. That was their job. And that was just, um, yeah, it was such a really amazing experience. And, uh, like barbecues, like full roast pork, local pork, you know, harvest in your own mushrooms. Yeah,

Lucy:

harvest

Jacob:

your own as Baric is from under the olive trees as almonds sort of interspersed as every house has its own yard and growing all this nice, um, food artichokes and stuff. And every, every house in the town has a, has their own like little, um, wine store underneath. Like it's all locally. Every family has their own vineyard, their own Olive Grove. Yeah. Their own vegetable patch. And they're all pressing their own olives. They're all pressing their own grapes. Um, yeah, it was just incredible. And. And, you know, being able to eat all the pasta and breads and no impacts on, you know, like gastrointestinally, you know, like I, so many people here have got all these gut problems and stuff and can't eat gluten, can't eat bread, don't eat pasta, avoid all that kind of stuff. And you go over there and you can eat it twice a day, you know, big meals, pasta twice a day, bread, you know, top it off with bread kind of thing and it's fine.

Lucy:

Mm-hmm. Um,

Jacob:

so, you know, there's obviously something else going on as well that's different in our food system, you know, like heritage crops, but also far less pesticides and all that kind of thing.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Um, far less kind of industrial interference, you know, with like stripping good stuff out of it, exposing it to weird sort of chemicals in storage processes. Yeah. Yeah. All that processing. Yeah. Um, so yeah. And then yeah, got kind of, yeah, kind of got called home, um, by an ancestor. I, that's the only way I can kind of put it. Yeah. While we were there. Um, yeah. Came home and then just tried to figure it out for a while and ended up going to university, mature age, did environmental science, marine science wasn't sure, but it was where it was gonna go. But I just liked the idea of understanding the environment better, um, you know, in that process, learning about all the land degradation in Australia.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Due to our poor management of the landscape, you know, just things like erosion salinity's, a major one. Um, yeah. And I, I thought, well. No. Why can't we plant long-lived native grasses into the landscape?

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

You know, to try to remediate some of that degradation. Because you know, you look at some species like kangaroo grass used to be ubiquitous across the landscape. Uh, in terms of food, it's not much good. But, um, in terms of like its importance as a keystone habitat forming species, like it's critical. It's so important for the landscape for all these different ecosystem functions and services. And you get it in like salty environments. You can find it in headlands and sand dunes right on the coast. So it's obviously adapted to salt. So it's like you've got this keytone habitat forming species and you've got solidity affected land. Um, why not put these native salt tolerant grasses back into the soil and remediate it and you can graze cattle on it. All, all that good stuff. Mm,

Lucy:

yeah. Totally.

Jacob:

And it's benefited biodiversity. Um, and in that sort of research that I inevitably came across articles speaking about, um, indigenous native grass use, like native grain food ways, um, and a lot of that was really centered around where my family comes from, like the country and, you know, you sort of grow up in Australia cause our old people really didn't talk about this stuff. Um, you know, what the food systems looked like. Um, you know, they were really sort of assimilated into modern agriculture since the 1830s they've been mm-hmm. Assimilated into that. Mm-hmm. As boundary rider and station hands and domestic servants and all that kind of stuff. Even myself, like my experience being on the land with the old people and elders and peers was cotton chipping.

Lucy:

Yeah. Wow. You know, I

Jacob:

wasn't, wasn't out there sort of walking country with harvesting foods. It was working on these massive, you know, endless fields of cotton walking through the cotton, getting crop dusters, spraying you with pesticide while you are out there seeing like these vast, manmade lakes full of all the water they'd siphoned outta the rivers. That was what we sort of grew up with as being normal. Mm-hmm. So, um, yeah, to, to sort of start learning about this alternative version that was, that had been happening. These native food systems and yeah, like I, I asked elders in my family and they yeah, they confirmed like really nonchalant. Yeah. You know? Yeah, of course we did that.

Lucy:

Yeah. Um,

Jacob:

and yeah, I guess like I was sort of hooked on it then because, you know, you had something that was gonna remediate the landscape. Um, you know, it was habitat forming like all these native grasses, so you know, where we got so many in all different sort of ecosystems, bio regions, and they're all sort of habitat forming species, A keystone species in the habitat. So look at native rice, for example, up north. Um, it's in the wetlands. You get dry land native rice as well. You know, in those wetland ecosystems, your native rice is like your keystone species because they, it forms that habitat for the wetland birds to build the nests in. Mm. The food is food for the birds. So they get, you know, really fat and healthy on the native rice as they put all that weight on. Um, in that good time without it, you know, they would perish. Yeah. During the hard periods, they put on all this good weight. Um, the babies get nice and healthy, but then you've also got like the water rats eating the rice and it goes up through the food chain and it's actually, if the rice wasn't there, the keys that, that, um, top predator, your crocodile wouldn't be there.'cause the crocodile eating. All the animals that are eating the rice. So you take away the rice, you lose the crocodile.

Lucy:

Yeah. Wow. Um,

Jacob:

And, and human beings as well. Were harvesting that rice. So, yeah. But I was just like, you know, yeah. It's good for the landscape's, good for the landscapes, good for the environment. Um, you know, we're trying to figure out how to, how do we farm in a changing climate or, you know, all these questions that they're asking around, like, how do we grow the ag industry? Um, but yeah, like that cultural connection was really what. It got me passionate about it.

Lucy:

Yeah. Um, and I wanted to ask as well,'cause you know, you sort of said you went back and you did this university degree, and you've done quite a bit of academic study now, right? You know, you did your environmental science, marine science, um, your bachelor of science with honors, you know, PhD candidate. But you know, I wondered how did you square the two different worlds, right? That sort of world of western academia and then all this indigenous knowledge that you're talking about, you know, was it difficult for you to kind of marry up those two different worlds?

Jacob:

Yeah, it's always been a struggle being in academia. Um, yeah, when I started, so, you know, like that little research during the undergrad led into the honors project and that, that was, um, looking at nutritional quality of seven native species. so I picked, um. Pick a species from every major bio region in Australia so that no matter where you were, you know, you were represented. Um, I sort of speaking to a plant that would be found in your ecosystem. Um, but yeah, doing that sort of nutritional work in a lab felt very sort of separate from, where I wanted to be with this work, which was taking leadership and guidance from elders and community, um, and working in a lab just feels very separated from that.

Lucy:

And yeah, totally.

Jacob:

Just sort of, and this is a lot of, a lot of research is really just done without any um, accountability to anybody. Mm-hmm.

Lucy:

You know,

Jacob:

you can just. Do this stuff in a laboratory, or you can sit in the ivory tower and talk about things, but, and have no accountability to how that research may actually impact people on the ground.

Lucy:

Mm.

Jacob:

Um, but yeah, I was, yeah, really keen to know how my work could help support, like further development of this opportunity. Um, so, so yeah, I actually ended up doing like a bit of a multidisciplinary project, so, you know, in the lab doing that hard sort of quantitative science. Um, and then COVID hit, and I live in Queensland. The labs are in New South Wales. I couldn't get to New South Wales. Yeah.'cause of the borders shutting. So it was like a really perfect opportunity for me to say, um, yeah, I'm gonna pivot and I want to. Use this opportunity to ya with my elders and people in our community about, you know, this work and it, it's an, an honors project, so I was pretty limited in what you can achieve in that sort of timeframe.

Yeah. But

Jacob:

yeah, for me that was how I sort of brought the two, two worlds together. I went, was doing that really hard quantitative stuff and then I was framing it or leading it through like this qualitative research I was doing with community.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

And so that meant like when I actually came to reporting the results of the nutritional research, which is still to date the most comprehensive nutritional research you can find anywhere.

Lucy:

Yeah. Wow.

Jacob:

Um, by de-identified the results. Because the feedback I was getting from community was like, now we, we see this with say, Kakadu. We, we had researchers doing all of this work, told the world how good it was and next thing's being grown overseas.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Um, the opportunity has been taken from community. The community's still involved there, you know, doing the wild harvest and stuff like that, but all of the value add is being done in capital cities like Perth, Melbourne. Mm, whatever. Um, yeah. You know, like these communities are spending weeks or months at a time out. Their whole family's out there harvesting, carting, you know, 20 kilo bags across countryside, back to the depot, um, and getting sort of peanuts for it, and then mm-hmm. Someone with a fancy label in the city. Powders it and sells it for a fortune.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

And you know, like does a bit of, sort of tells everybody how good they are about indigenous engagement. I'm not picking on anyone in particular. They probably all do it to be honest.

Lucy:

Yeah, yeah. Um, you know,

Jacob:

if you really want to be genuine in this space, you'd be working to make sure that that processing was in community as an opportunity for community.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Um, you know, not just sort of keeping them as the wild harvesters so you can sort of claim that little sort of black tokenism.

Lucy:

Yeah, totally. And I feel like this sort of leads us into, into, um, Yara and Yal and, and your work with the Gila Roy Food Sovereignty Working Group. So I wondered if you could sort of talk a little bit about what that organization does and, and looking to, to do the, the value add and, and bring, bring local communities in into the whole process.

Jacob:

Yeah. Um, yeah, so Yammer and Yarro, um, at the, at the time we had, um, one of our really significant species was being grown on Ware country by farmers, non-indigenous farmers. But we had really good relationship with them, um, and they, they really got it, they got the vision, um, and they were really sort of aligning with a lot of values around creating localized opportunities and localized food system. And because they were one of those intergenerational families. So, you know, it, it, it's a lot 4,000 hectares or acres, but out there, it's sort of nothing like it was mm. Hundreds of families each with these little 4,000 acre properties and these communities out west, you know, G Country, particularly the northern part around the border of New South Wales and Queensland. Very, very vibrant places. Yeah. Because you had so many families in there. Um, you know, even like my mum remembers just how vibrant and diverse these communities were. Um, but yeah. You know, like the, just this whole get big or get out

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Kind of mentality. In Australia's agriculture sector means a lot of these, these families are no longer, they're not supported. We, we don't support our farmers in Australia, despite everything. We sort of, you know, claim that rhetoric, but the reality is they don't really get a lot of support at all. And Yeah, in the climate, like they. It's harder and harder to be a viable enterprise. And so you've got the bigger farms consolidating all of the other farms, and you've got investor consortiums and corporate interests buying up all this stuff. Mm-hmm. And it just becomes, it's no longer agricul, it's agri business.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Um, so they, they were really trying to keep their community alive, this family, and so they're really good to work with. But, um, so we had a supply of native grains through them and it's like, well, we don't have land to grow with. The next best thing we can do is take ownership once it leaves the farm gate and assert that cultural governance over it then. Um, so yeah, Yara and Yara was really just, it was set up to start to. Do the r and d work on the processing side of things and the milling and the product development and all that kind of stuff. Um, so yeah, we set up like a processing part of the, I've got a warehouse set up processing, so that's, um, to, so when with native grains, when you harvest them, even with modern machinery like a combine header, they still aren't threshed like a modern header might thresh wheat. Mm-hmm. For example. So you drive through the paddock and at the other end of the header you spit out like nice clean grain that's ready to go to the mill. Um, there's a whole extra process there around getting the edible grain out of the husk, this hard husk that protects the grain. Um. So we set up that processing ability to be able to de our grains and um, yeah. The cool thing is in having that ability, we actually have the ability to do all types of grains. So whether it's things like spel or millet, um, even your like pseudo cereals, like amran, duck, quinoa, hemp, we'd be able to process and de husk those grains. Um, so that's the first part of it. Yeah. And we've, we've got, we've got that ability there right now already. Um, you know, so despite other people saying that technology doesn't exist, it actually does. And it wasn't actually that difficult too. Like you got teams of university researchers working on their stuff and I did it in a little shed by myself.

Lucy:

Yeah. Wow.

Jacob:

So. Then once we've milled, um, once we process the grain and we've got stone mills there to mill it into flower, so again, like using stone mills is about maintaining an element of that cultural integrity where stones have always been used to mill grains into flour by cultures around the world. Um, and that's a really important thing, um, for a bunch of reasons. But most importantly, it's about that health outcome. Yeah. So you, you, your meal grain in a stone mill is you're retaining all of that good nutrition. You actually, you have to treat stone milled flour like fresh fruit and veggies. cause it's, it's still a living product. Then when you meal it, it's still. Alive and you actually have to treat it like a fresh product once you've milled the grain. So grain can sit there, um, for years, but once you mill it and expose all of those elements to air, it actually starts to degrade. Mm. So you have to, you know, like it's, it's like fresh fruit and veggies, you know, which is why the system sort of went the other way and created shelf stable flour. Yeah. Because it's about commodity. Um, yeah. You can, I guess it was necessity too when they were opening up, you know, like colonizing the interior. You know, I only have one pack horse of supplies going out. Into the bush once a year, you know, so they've gotta have shelf stable flower. Um, but yeah, it's not good for people's health.

Lucy:

No. Um, yeah, people really don't, so, yeah, no, it's, think about flour as a, as a living thing or as a fresh product. We're just so used to that. Yeah. You know, dead bag of, of white dust really, you know, but it, but when it's treated right, yeah. It's, it's so full of, of nutrients and of life.

Jacob:

Yeah. Yeah. There's a real, like, stigma around grain now, especially wheat. and yeah, I, I think that's a really big part of it, is the way we've stripped the nutrients out of it. And I guess also we've bred it for a whole bunch of other things. We've bred it for yield, we've bred it for being more resilient in our climate, but we've never bred it to be better for people. So every time we breed it, we lose a little bit of nutrition or we, we favor something like the gluten proteins to increase. Um, and then we cover it in all sorts of dangerous pesticides and then we eat it. yeah, so we got, got the processing, we've got the mills. Um, and then, you know, looking at now what do, what do we do with it then? Um, now ideally for me is being able to sell that into the local food system.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

You know, like it just here, here on the Sunshine Coast and in the south part of the sunny coast around Calandra and we've probably got three or four Italian like wood-fired pizza vans, proper Italians and being Italians, they. Buy if they can't get it in Australia, they're buying directly from Italy. Yeah. So they're getting their flour from Italy rather than using Australian flour, which tells you something.

Mm-hmm.

Jacob:

But, um, you know, that isn't super sustainable, but it's also, you know, like you wanna support your local food system and our local sort of food culture and like, you know, we're a real hybrid now in Australia of all sorts of different cultures and foods. Um, so that, that's for me would be like ideal is, you know, like working with local artisans and, and food businesses.

Lucy:

Yeah. To

Jacob:

see how we can sort of develop a product that's gonna suit their needs. yeah. But then with the natives, it's sort of, it's sort of been a bit of a journey like a. Trying to figure out what we do and Yeah. Recently was over in North America on Churchill Fellowship you mentioned.

Lucy:

Mm. Yeah. Well, earlier in

Jacob:

the show

Lucy:

I absolutely wanna hear all about it, what, you know.

Jacob:

Yeah.

Lucy:

It sounds like it was an incredible experience.

Jacob:

Yeah. And, um, I guess that's a good segue into it, and it's hard to like, try to keep everything linear because it all is so interconnected. Yeah, totally. Um, and I, and I'll circle, I'll talk about the Churchill and circle back to what I'm doing with the natives, but Yeah. Yes, please. so yeah, we went in August last year, so August, 2024. Spent three months traveling around Canada and the United States. Um, just sort of connecting into the indigenous food sovereignty movement over there.

Mm.

Jacob:

Mostly interested in, uh, what they're doing with their grains. Mm-hmm. So, so when we think of grains, like we think of wheat, barley, rice, but also corn. Corn is a grain. Corns are,

Lucy:

yeah. They're

Jacob:

just grasses. They're all, all these species are just grasses. So corn's are grass us. Corn is incredibly significant throughout the Americas. Um, and then for the, the Anishnabe, peoples Ojibwe Chippewa, they, they got the wild rice manno, which is in incredibly significant for them. And yeah, so I was just connecting it all over the place, but trying to focus on what other people are doing with their unique cereals And grains. Um, yeah. And. It was really, really, um, inspiring to see what some of these Native Nations are doing over there, particularly in the USA. Canada's probably more on par with us, even though they've got treaty, a lot of the treaty rights aren't honored. And, still a lot of that disparity, um, systemic racism, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Not a lot of like land rights either. Some communities are doing better than others, but where I was in the far north of British Columbia, it was like, like a mission in Australia. Their, their conditions, like similar to us and similar experiences. And I like talking, talking to people. There is like everything they were saying, I was like, I, you know, I just, I get it a hundred percent. Like that's exactly the same experiences back in Australia. So. Austral and Canada are very similar. Um, settler, colonial and indigenous experience.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

And perspectives, um, and realities. Whereas USA is a bit different where it's, um, you know, they've got treaty in the reservations, which has given them a level of self determination.

Lucy:

Yeah. Um,

Jacob:

and that, and, and when and when they're given that ability to self govern their own affairs, that's when that fundamental like those paradigm shifts occur. Is that self-governance, over your own affairs and, um, that was so many, uh, we just don't have heaps of time. like I don't wanna spend all day talking about, so I sort of talk about the most. Inspiring one was the, an United Nation, um, the Aida originally from New York, and they got treaty land in Wisconsin.

Lucy:

Mm-hmm.

Jacob:

So a lot of the tribe moved to Wisconsin and a lot of the unit United remain in New York. But yeah, the, the, the ones in new in Wisconsin are the, really the ones who have, they're 30 years ahead of us.

Lucy:

Yeah. Wow. Um,

Jacob:

yeah. And 30, 30 years ago, you know, 1994, they were where, where we were. So back in 1994, us and them, we were on par.

Ivan:

And'cause they had that level of governance, they were able to come together and say, you know, we need to do something about this. You know, we need to. Create economic opportunity for our people. We need to get our people healthy and we need to do a whole bunch of work educating and empowering people. And yeah, they, they, they took, made a strategic plan. Like they, they set a vision for themselves and they started getting to work on it. And it was all around for, for me, like,'cause I just see the food side of it. Like I was, I seen it all centered around food systems and'cause that fundamentally they're trying to improve the health of their community.

Jacob:

So they've created these fully, sort of integrated, they're approaching circular food systems in their community where they, and I think it, it's. Also for me, like being a native grain sort of nerd, I, I've seen it all centered around their corn. Mm-hmm. So the Aida had this white corn, um, incredibly sort of nutritious and special to them, but it, but like our native grains, it's super difficult to process. Mm-hmm. Like, it's, it'll never be commercial. That's why they've done all this plant breeding on corn is so they, that's all uniform now. They can harvest it and all this kind of stuff, process it easily and do whatever they do with it. Most corn actually doesn't even end up in the food system. Yeah. Those other things. But, um, this white, the united white corn, it's incredibly nutritious for a human. Like it's 30% protein or something.

Lucy:

Wow.

Jacob:

It's like, like the corn you get now is like 4% protein. So it's, it's fundamentally two different things nutritionally, um. It's hard to you, you have to hand harvest it, you have to hand process it. There's all these extra steps and, but they were determined to bring that back and develop these healthy food systems that were about feeding their people healthy food. And so they've, uh, they've got, and they've only got 23,000 acres, so their reservation is about 60,000 acres, but it's not all one sort of contiguous parcel of land. It's all broken up.'Cause, you know, dodgy stuff got pushed through Yeah. The American governor note during the years, and it allowed people to sell off land. So if you've got people in poverty and they can make a bit of money by selling their parcel of land, then, you know, sometimes they have no option. And so they've lost two thirds of their land, but they're slowly buying it back.

Mm-hmm.

Jacob:

But even on that 23,000 acres, which, you know, that grand scheme of things, you know, looking out, like I was saying, out west 4,000 acres for one family, the NIDA on 23,000 acres have like a 600 head herd of black Angus cattle. Is it? No. 500 about, is it 600 or six? 6,000 acres of crops?

Lucy:

Mm-hmm.

Jacob:

Um, they have four and a half thousand apple and pear trees. Wow. And an orchard. They've pasture raised eggs. They have grass fed beef, they have multiple farms. They have like a collective of farmers growing their white, white corn. Um, they have three bison herds, so they have about 120 bison.

Lucy:

Wow.

Jacob:

They don't sell any of that bison. That bison feeds their own people.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Um. All, all, all this kind of stuff. And in doing all of this, they've generated all of these economic opportunities around it, around a localized food system.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Um, and they've been able to give confidence to local entrepreneurs by saying, yes, as a tribe, we will buy X amount of food off you every week forever. And then you, then the entrepreneur can say, yeah, awesome. Like, let's get into farming. Let's set up a farm. And that's what's happening over there. Like, all these families are starting to get farming and getting more and more successful and sharing that so more families can do it. So it's not about trying to dominate the system, it's about spreading that wealth and opportunity laterally.

Lucy:

Mm-hmm.

Jacob:

Um, but they're, they're feeding. All of these incredibly nutritious foods back into their community. And a lot of it is free. So it's going into their childcare centers for free. So the little kids are eating it. Mm-hmm. It's going to the schools for free. So the kids at school are eating it. Um, it's going into like the hospital and healthcare facility. So people in there are eating good food. It's going into the aged care facility. So the elders are eating good food. They have a tribal elder food box program, which the elders living at home are getting like a Meals on Wheels, but it's like just this super nutritious food. And then there's like a food box program for people who need a bit of extra help, um, can get like X amount of dollars per week of, of free food. And then they're selling it into the local enterprises. So local restaurants and local. Food co-ops and, um, local stores. So they've created this fully integrated food system and it's almost circular. They're gonna be setting, building a recycling facility, um, and composting where they can take all of that food waste and turn it back into soil and compost to send back to the farms.

Lucy:

Yeah. Awesome.

Jacob:

And then they're doing the aquaculture as well, that they're gonna be getting into that. So creating this fully integrated circular food system. And,

Lucy:

and

Jacob:

I use the analogy of like, you know, like how do you capture some of the, the economic benefit because obviously the tribe is having to subsidize a whole lot of this stuff, but if you think, you know, they say in Australia, um, we should be sort of budgeting a hundred dollars a week per person on groceries, which I think is. Pretty, um, grossly underestimating how much money we actually have to spend at the supermarkets, but let's just say a hundred dollars per person per week, um, is being spent at a, you know, Coles or Woolworths here in Australia. How much of that a hundred dollars is gonna stay in your community? How much of it is gonna go to international shareholders and into the banks of Coles and Woolworths? Like how much it really is gonna end up in your local community? Yeah. In your neighbor's bank account, in your bank account, in your brother's bank account. Um, probably very little of it. And then you look at the ER example. If you're spending a hundred dollars a week on food in that community. How much of that a hundred dollars is staying in the community? Yeah. When you're buying locally grown and locally processed food, the, it's almost they'll get to a point where a hundred percent you spend a hundred dollars and a hundred dollars will circulate back through the community.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

It's totally different. And that's really what, um, yeah, that's what I would love to see here. Yeah. And I think like that's what we wanna pioneer in, um, in, in our indigenous communities. I think, um, uh, I, I feel that's the best place to pioneer this work.

Mm-hmm.

Jacob:

Um, but yeah, in that trip, circling back to that previous question, um, I. You know, seeing what d and Ida are doing. Seeing what other examples, like Tea Creek, our friends in Canada, you know, they were growing. They grow like 20,000 pounds of organic heritage, farm fresh fruit and vegetables each year. They, like, they've brought back a whole bunch of like heritage varieties of potato that grew up there and, and we're talking 14 hours north of Vancouver and they had potatoes up there. Wow. Which originated in like Peru or something. Mm. So also speaks to like the trade that was happening, but, um, they're growing all this healthy foods, 20,000 pounds a year. Like, you know, how much income could that generate? But they're donating every single last pound of food that they grow back into their local community.

Lucy:

Wow.

Jacob:

And so I was seeing this kind of stuff being repeated again and again over there and. Yeah, everywhere. I went from Canada to California to New York, to Wisconsin, to Minnesota, New Mexico, everywhere in between. Nobody was selling these foods for a profit.

Lucy:

Mm.

Jacob:

If they were selling them, they were selling them to cover some of the operational costs. And that was it. It was, if they were selling it, it was heavily subsidized. The priority was everywhere we went was using these traditional foods to heal people. That was what it was about, getting these healthy foods back into people's diets. And that was kind of like, for me, kind of revelation. And I sort of, from that, I made a resolution within myself that I wasn't gonna be selling native grains for a profit. You know, because how can you justify that to yourself if, I don't know, for me, like built building in a business of cultural knowledge of a cultural food, cultural license and then selling it for like a premium, you know, how, how is that benefiting the bigger picture?

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Um, and so yeah, the, the shift has been, you know, like if we, if we have the ability in Yammer and yal to, to do all types of grains, if we can do mill and we can do spel and we can do heritage wheat and sell that stuff into our local food system, then that. We'll subsidize the native grains that we then get back out into our community. Yeah. Into the diets, into the bellies of our elders.'cause it's like, it retails anywhere between 180 and$360 a kilo. Wow. Native grain flour. It's like how we keep saying, oh, do it for our elders. We do it for our people, do it for our community. Like, how is an elder supposed to afford a kilogram of native grain flour at that price? You know what a, I'd love to see our kids and, and, uh, like, imagine pregnant mothers eating this because it's incredibly nutritious. Like, yeah. It, I did the nutritional reset, so I know, and, and it's incredibly nutritious. We're talking about a super food, and so imagine sort of feeding that to pregnant mothers, so they're getting that boost of vitamins, but also they're unborn child is getting a boost, so you're sort of hitting two birds there. Um, you know, like given, given kids that next generation, like that head start in health. Um, but yeah, that's kind, I guess still a ways off because while I said we did have that family growing our native grains, they, Unexpectedly sold the farm.

Lucy:

Wow.

Jacob:

And the first thing the new farmer did, you know, the ink had, hadn't even dried on the contract and he had to come in there and prep for the upcoming Season. And um, first thing he did when he got in there is he plowed that native grain cropped back into the ground so that he could put wheat into it. Yeah. So we lost it, we lost that resource. Um, so yeah, it was sort of now back to square one with looking at accessing land to grow our own.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

So that's really what has to be about. Um, yeah, like our own land that isn't sort of tied up in time limitations or those un other unexpected things.'cause you could invest a lot of money and time into getting a native grain crop established cause we're having to relearn everything. Like guys, the on illa country, a lot of these native grains are, disappeared, like locally extinct or. Just hanging on, barely hanging

Lucy:

on. Yeah.

Jacob:

Just'cause of the intensive agriculture out there and invasive species. so having to relearn how to work with it. So we really need to access our own land that we can manage and not sort of have to worry about, you know, are they gonna take it off us if we can't produce a crop in 12 months, or are they gonna sell the farm out from under us? Or that kind of thing. Yeah, I

Lucy:

mean, as you say, that self-determination can make such a huge difference. And, you know, I think it's so interesting thinking about, you know, people 30 years ago you were on the same track and now 30 years ahead they've really taken off and created a whole new system. If you could hop in a time machine and imagine, uh, your country in, in 30 years time what kind of, what kind of things would you like to see and, and what would you like the native grains and indigenous foodways to look like 30 years from now?

Jacob:

before we look 30 years into the future, just take it back to what created that shift? What I think is the thing that we need to do now to replicate what the people like the NIDA did 30 years ago, because we, if we wanna get there, it's not gonna happen overnight. So, but there is a starting point. There is like a fundamental thing that we can do right now to put ourselves on that same trajectory. Um, and this is what we're trying to do with our working group and we're, this is kind of being validated all across the United States and, and I, I know we have to adapt it to our own context in Australia.'cause like I said, we're very different to, we don't have treaty here, um, so we have to adapt it. But what's worked for them, the reason why some of those nations over there are so far advanced from us and an example of where they're advanced, you know, is. I was talking about those in those circular food systems, integrated feeding their people healthy, that tangible outcome from that has been, they were living the same life expectancy as indigenous people in Australia. And in changing all of, doing all that work, their life expectancy is now, it's not just in par with the rest of America. They are now living longer than the American national average.

Lucy:

Wow. Some of

Jacob:

these native nations. So that's the kind of impact this work can have. So you're not just bringing your life expectancy up to be in empower, you're actually living longer because you are doing something Right. So. Where it all began. And, uh, this, this work got validated by Harvard University. It's now been taken up by the University of Arizona, and it's all around nation building. So it's, it's setting that really strong strategic, sustainable, purpose-driven indigenous governance, people collectivizing, which is what we're doing with our working group, setting a strategic direction for us. The native grains industry development. Is that strategic kind of direction for us now, we don't have treaty, we don't have self-governance, we don't have access to government sort of income streams or grants because. Very, very few grants actually support this kind of work. but for us, this is that way is, um, using that native grains industry as a way of setting that really strong strategic self-governance around an opportunity and using that as a doorway into the bigger sort of food and agriculture sector.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

So that's been, that, that's what set them on a different trajectory to us is that governance and yeah. So that's what we are trying to achieve. And I guess like, um, you know, sort of looking 30 years from now, you know, the community say on Camilla country, uh. Are dying off, you know, where they, like I was saying before, where they used to be vibrant and diverse. You know, where my sort of mom went to school, maybe at its peak there might've been 300 kids.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Now there's 10 10 kids at that school. it's the same sort of story all around there. Um, know a lot of the opportunities, uh, uh, I guess only intermittent or seasonal. So, you know, seasonal cotton work, for example.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Um. And at least they used to employ a lot of locals for a lot of that stuff, but now it's a lot of transient workers. Mm-hmm. They a lot of farms getting foreign workers. Yeah.'cause they can exploit them a little bit easier. Yeah,

Lucy:

I was gonna say it's, you know, and not treating them very well.

Jacob:

Yeah. Pay, pay'em less and Yeah. All, all that kind of stuff. And they probably get a government sort of kickback from it as well. I, I don't know what the situation is, but Yeah. So, so for me, like looking 30 years into the future, like instead of driving down the highway and seeing like bear bare fields and well, you know, the sim same sort of monoculture stretching to the horizon or, you know, I'd see these really diverse native grasslands. You know, you, you, you can sort of walk into that, into a paddock of say, and if within one square meter you might find like 30 different species of grasses, herbs, Forbes, you know, you got the emu in there, you got the plains Turkey, the kangaroo, um, you know, your rivers, rivers might be running clear again.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

Uh, our rivers used to run clear. Now they're all silted up and just dirty brown all the time. clear rivers with ducks, nesting on the, on the edge in the reeds and, and, uh, insects flying across the surface of the water. You don't see that kind of stuff anymore. And I'd like to see people out there, you know, harvesting again and, you know, we're, we're not gonna feed the world hand harvesting, but it's, it's that practice of being out there and experiencing that kind of thing and coming back and processing that and cooking that and building an entire meal out of food from that place, you know, and, and being able to invite people out into that experience, uh, from all walks of life. Um, you know, I would see like localized food systems. Uh, you could, you could have one of those 4,000 acre properties and you could be doing so much. On that one piece of land. You could have your crops of native grains, you could have a sustainable forestry. You know, we have termite resistant timber out there. You could be supplying the timber that is building the houses in our local community. Um, I would see crops of, you know, other types of cereals. So, like I said, we, we can't expect not in 30 years to, you know,'cause I'm expecting we're not gonna get the funding. But also like the, I like to, to maintain the diversity in the food system. Yeah. And the resiliency of it. So I would see not just native grains, I would see our native grains complemented by other types of grains. You know, like Heritage, wheat and spell. And I would see that stuff being processed in the community. And I would see local community mills and I would see local bakeries, you know, baking bread out of locally grown cereals. You know, like a, imagine a blend of one to five Native grain. Bread. And you could have like your sweet pastries with native, like your quandongs that we get out there, native quandongs and, and your savory stuff with your river mints and that kind of thing. On, on Imagine a pizza. yeah. And I would see that as a model for other communities to replicate.'cause we're trying to build these localized, And culturally identified food systems. know this idea I've been talking about for so long now is, you know this, imagine this food trail through. Australia and you're experiencing like indigenous food systems and we could multiple communities, like there's so many communities out there in semi at Queensland, new South Wales that grow native grains, that have native grains story, but each community's gonna have a little bit of a different story, different assemblage of, of grains. Uh, we can, we can have our Roy bread and our neighbors Kuma could have a Kuma bread and you just keep following all the way out to somewhere like WinDor. I guess, um, just seeing, seeing the landscape flourish it's seeing communities, you know, flourishing. Again, it's providing opportunities for people to stay out on country.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

You know, like we are losing the, you know, despite everything that happened during colonization, like our families managed to stay on country through all of that, you know, through the displacement, people getting pushed onto missions and stolen generations and massacre for people to have been able to maintain that uninterrupted connection to the place of our ancestors. And that's despite everything that happened, it's now being broken now in this modern time because opportunity's not there.

Lucy:

Yeah.

Jacob:

So we are breaking that connection because we've got no opportunities to stay in the community.

Lucy:

Mm. Wouldn't it be great to see that that local school, you know, with a couple of hundred kids, again, all eating that local Gila Roy bread for lunch and their families working in that space. Yeah.

Jacob:

Yeah. And it's thinking about how you Yeah. How you activate a bigger opportunity. Mm-hmm. And that's really where that strategic sort of thing comes in. That's where you Yeah. You, you take that time, to figure it out, and you keep that intention, you know, this isn't the current system isn't, the current model isn't working. you know, let's trial, let's just trial. Like what have we got to lose in? Well, I guess nobody has anything to lose except the people who, you know, make all the money out of it.

Lucy:

Mm.

Jacob:

But in terms of like community society in general. Uh, the savings, how much it's gonna save in government expenditure. It just giving like indigenous communities a chance to sort of try and do this, to try and replicate one of these models that we've seen that do work. We know that they work. Yeah. And it's not because they have treaty, they, they haven't worked because treaty treaty just brought people together. it meant they had to have some kind of governing body.

Lucy:

Mm.

Jacob:

It was up to the governing body to then set that intention. It's no reason why we can't pull ourselves together as well.

Lucy:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Agroecology Radio Hour. If you'd like to support SSA's work, please head to our website, a fs.org au, where you can become a member or follow the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance on social media. You can also sign up as a subscriber to this podcast on buy me a coffee.com and contact us via our email address australian.food dot sovereignty@gmail.com. Thanks to our producer Ivan Blackett and our guest Jacob Birch. We'll put relevant links in the show notes if you'd like to know more about Jacob's work with Yara and Yael and his Churchill Fellowship and other work in the Native grain space. And of course, please share this podcast with your networks to help grow the food sovereignty movement in Australia and beyond Viva.